Books of The Times; Aryan Archetype and His Date With a Grenade

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: April 17, 1989

Posterity has sometimes portrayed him as the beau ideal of the racist Nazi fantasy, the fulfillment of the blond-haired blue-eyed Aryan dream. But one contemporary described Reinhard Tristan Heydrich in less flattering terms:

''He was a tall, impressive figure with a broad, unusually high forehead, small restless eyes as crafty as an animal's and of uncanny power, and a wide full-lipped mouth,'' wrote Walter Schellenberg, Heydrich's protege in the German intelligence service. ''His hands were slender and rather too long - they made one think of the legs of a spider. His splendid figure was marred by the breadth of his hips, a disturbingly feminine effect which made him appear even more sinister. His voice was much too high for so large a man and his speech was nervous and staccato.''

Whatever the reality of his physical appearance, Heydrich was by all accounts brilliant, ruthless, sadistic and profoundly anti-Semitic. Determined to scale the heights of Nazi power, by the spring of 1942 he was well on his way. Second in command of the Schutzstaffel - Heinrich Himmler's rapidly expanding security system -and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia, he was responsible for creating a model SS state in which all Czechoslovak culture would be Germanicized and all Czechoslovak Jews ''resettled'' in the Eastern territories.

But on May 27, 1942, while riding in an open touring car from his home to his office, Heydrich was fatally wounded in a grenade attack by members of the Czechoslovak underground parachuted in by the British. It was an event so singular and so successful in its immediate objective that it has ever after posed the question why other major Nazi figures didn't suffer similar fates.

In ''The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich,'' Callum MacDonald, a historian at the University of Warwick, England, has provided the most complete account to date of Heydrich's assassination. He has offered a portrait of the so-called Butcher of Prague that explains why Adolf Hitler admired him so and considered him a possible successor.

He has traced Heydrich's rise in the back alleys of Nazi politics, and he has described the complex process by which the Czechoslovak government in exile was able to maneuver Heydrich's assassins into the Bohemian-Moravian Protectorate. Finally, he has given us a dramatic reconstruction of the actual attack, down to such details as the grass the assassins stuffed into their briefcases to hide their weapons, in the hope that prying eyes would mistake it for rabbit food, or the two SS jackets lying folded in the back seat of Heydrich's car that were whirled upwards by the grenade blast and draped over a trolley wire.

It is on the whole an impressive job Mr. MacDonald has done, by turns subtle in its political analysis and gripping in its narrative drive. Making use of previously unpublished official files, as well as the recollections of former Czechoslovak intelligence officers, he has dispelled what he considers to be the various misconstructions of the motives behind the killing, among them that Heydrich ''was assassinated to prevent the extermination of the European Jews, the 'Final Solution' for which he had been made responsible in 1941,'' or that the British ''had Heydrich removed because he knew too much about the treasonable activities of the Duke of Windsor in the summer of 1940.''

But more to the point, the book makes it clearer why the killing of a major Nazi figure like Heydrich was such an exceptional event. For as Mr. MacDonald reconstructs his history, the act depended on a desperate gamble by Eduard Benes, the leader of the Czechoslovak government in exile, who hoped with a single stroke to impress the Soviet Union and England with the Czechoslovak underground's war effort, to raise the prestige of his leadership in contrast to that of the Czechoslovak Communists, and to forestall the possibility of the Nazis' making a compromise peace with the Czechoslovak people.

The results of the assassination were highly debatable, in Mr. MacDonald's analysis. Critics pointed to the terrible reprisals inflicted by the Nazis, which cost some 5,000 lives and saw the entire village of Lidice wiped out. Was any man's life worth such a price? Proponents argued that both the killing and the bloodbath it provoked constituted a propaganda victory. The master race was shown to be vulnerable.

Few mourned the loss of Heydrich. Hitler ''compared his death to a lost battle,'' the author observes. ''Heydrich was buried as a Nazi martyr, his final resting place designed as a shrine to inspire future generations of SS men.'' But few others were sorry to see him go, if for no better reason than that his personal safe was rumored to contain ''bulging dossiers on his fellow Nazis whose disclosure could prove embarrassing.'' When Heydrich died, ''Himmler's first act was to seize the key to this blackmailer's hoard, which he appropriated for his own exclusive use.''

Certainly the world did not lose a philosopher. In a deathbed conversation with Himmler, the talk turned to fate, and Heydrich quoted some lines from an opera called ''Amen'' by his father, the unsuccessful composer Bruno Heydrich: ''The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.''

Talk about the banality of evil. As Mr. MacDonald concludes: ''For Heydrich, who had murdered thousands in the pursuit of total power, to appeal to fate or predestination was hypocrisy on the grand scale.''